Zcash developers are aiming for November 5 to deploy an upgrade that will reduce block intervals from 75 seconds down to 25 seconds. The upcoming NU7 update will also begin putting aside a portion of network transaction fees to fund upcoming mining payouts.
This timeline stems from discussions among the core development organizations including the Zcash Foundation, Project Tachyon, Valar, ZODL, and Shielded Labs. These engineering teams reached a unanimous consensus regarding the update’s features following a series of polls involving community members and token holders.
Approximately 2.4 million ZEC were cast in the voting process, representing 66% of the available pool. Out of those votes, 98.9% favored maintaining the current Zcash halving model, and 96.6% selected February 2031 as the date to start returning accumulated fees back to miners.
Creators of payment-oriented protocols like Zcash envision digital value transferring directly from an individual’s personal wallet to a business or peer via a decentralized ledger, bypassing traditional banking channels or card processors like Visa and Mastercard. This empowers users to store and spend digital currencies straight from their personal devices, both online and internationally, without relying on a bank or card institution to execute every single transfer.
Public blockchains present inherent privacy hurdles. Transacting from a transparent address can leak its balance sheet, historical transfers, and connections to other wallets. A shielded Zcash transfer conceals the sender, receiver, and transaction value from public visibility, enabling users to make purchases without leaving a searchable financial footprint for the merchant or anyone observing the blockchain.
Zcash block times
Blocks represent collections of transactions that miners append to a ledger, and a payment achieves its initial validation when it registers inside one. Shortening the target block duration for Zcash will enable exchanges or bridges that depend on a set amount of confirmations to release ZEC in roughly one-third of the duration.
At a physical retail store, it would still lag behind tapping a plastic card, but the reduced delay renders direct confidential transactions significantly more viable according to Zcash engineers.
Generating three times as many blocks, however, will not produce triple the amount of ZEC. The proposal divides the incentive distributed per block by three and lengthens the halving period from 1.68 million blocks to 5.04 million, keeping overall token creation consistent over time.
The NU7 overhaul will additionally introduce the Zcash Network Sustainability Mechanism.
Under ZIP-235, around 60% of transaction fees will be temporarily extracted from circulation rather than distributed to miners. Those coins are slated to flow back through block subsidies starting in February 2031, bolstering miner revenue as standard Zcash issuance declines through subsequent halving events.
The network upgrade will phase out the legacy transaction structure while introducing no brand-new formats. Digital wallets are not anticipated to require major modifications, though full nodes, indexers, and block explorers might need updates.
Source code is scheduled for completion by September 30 ahead of NU7 deploying to the Zcash test network on October 6. Developers will make the definitive mainnet choice and establish an activation block height on October 20, designating November 5 as a target schedule rather than a locked-in release date.
Read More: Zcash holders overwhelmingly back faster transactions and bitcoin-style halvings
Originally published at https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2026/09/18/zcash-targets-november-upgrade-to-make-private-payments-up-to-three-times-faster.
